Oak Island Money Pit

Is there treasure deep down?

Throughout history, we’ve never ceased to be enamoured with tales of buried treasure, secret inscriptions, and booby traps. But one of the most enduring treasure mysteries of all time comes from a tiny island off the coast of Nova Scotia in eastern Canada.

Oak Island is the home of what is informally known as the “Money Pit,” an incredibly deep hole of incredibly elaborate construction discovered in 1795.

Over two centuries of excavation have unearthed no treasure thus far, but what has been discovered is arguably just as fascinating. Underneath the surface of the pit are a series of wooden platforms, and even deeper, flooding mechanisms formed from multiple underground canals leading to water.

The first time someone managed to dig deep enough, the entire pit was immediately flooded, and due to the construction of the mechanism, it would fill back up with water as fast as you could remove it. At the 90-foot mark, an inscribed, encoded stone tablet was found that was revealed to say “forty feet below, two million pounds lie beneath.”

In search for whatever the island is hiding, the money pit has attracted the attention of hundreds of search parties, including former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who in his youth spent a summer with fellow Harvard grads in search of the treasure. It’s truly a historical oddity, but considering that we’re no closer to finding out who dug the pit and why, after 200 years of searching, one must wonder if we ever will.